PLDT taps Ciena solutions for network

Ciena Corp., a network specialist, on Friday said that Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT) has deployed its 5410 Packet-Optical Reconfigurable Switch System (RSS) and OneConnect Intelligent Control Plane software across its global network footprint.

“As the largest telecommunications provider in the Philippines and a rapidly growing international carrier, it is critical that our infrastructure is highly reliable and capable of delivering robust broadband service and applications,” said Napoleon Nazareno, president and chief executive officer of PLDT.

With the Ciena platforms, both critical components of the company’s OPn architecture, PLDT will create a global mesh network that interconnects points of presence worldwide into a highly resilient and intelligent mesh switching network to provide greater network performance, efficiency and resiliency to meet stringent service level agreement (SLA) requirements.

“With the implementation of Ciena’s intelligent optical mesh network solutions across our international network, we are able to give our enterprise and wholesale customers a variety of low-latency, high-capacity services with the utmost assurance, putting us on par with large global carriers,” Nazareno said.

Ciena’s OneConnect technology will allow PLDT to quickly detect faults and automatically switch data traffic to backup routes as needed in the event of a network outage.

This allows PLDT’s business customers to minimize the impact of breakages from cable cuts, earthquakes and network outages, by staying connected to their worldwide offices without any connectivity disruption.

“With our packet-optical technology and intelligent optical control plane software, PLDT will be able to offer its customers high-availability, high-capacity SONET/SDH, OTN and ethernet dedicated services over a global intelligent mesh network,” said Anthony McLachlan, vice president and general manager of Asia Pacific, Ciena.

“Our control plane software allows service providers like PLDT to fine tune their networks to be more intelligent and to quickly respond to changing network demands—without manual intervention,” he added.